Possibilities soar as costs for genetic blueprint plummet

Study Watch

November 9, 2008|By CONTRA COSTA (CALIF.) TIMES

BERKELEY, Calif. -- The relatively low cost of sequencing the genome of a Chinese man and an African man brings ever closer the prospect that average people can see their full genetic blueprint, according to separate studies published last week in the journal Nature.

"You will have your genome sequenced, and I will have my genome sequenced," predicted Rasmus Nielsen, an associate professor of biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a co-author of the Chinese-genome study.

The plummeting costs of genome sequencing means an individual's genetic data will likely be used far sooner than expected to assess disease susceptibility or to tailor more-effective drug regimes.

Nielsen and UC Berkeley colleagues Ines Hellmann and John Pool are the only U.S.-based authors of the article; collaborators were British researchers and scientists from the Beijing Genomics Institute and other Chinese institutions.

"No one predicted the price would go down so fast that the sequencing of genomes for medical purposes would happen in my lifetime," Nielsen said.

The two genomes sequenced thus far and made publicly available -- those of genetics luminaries James Watson and Craig Venter -- cost hundreds of millions of dollars each using an older technology, Nielsen said. In contrast, it cost less than $500,000 to decode the Chinese male's genetic blueprint. The team of scientists decoding the African man's sequence described the endeavor as "low cost." Both used a technique called "next-generation sequencing" that's far less laborious than the older technique.

"In a few years, you can do it for a few thousand," Nielsen said. In the coming decades he estimated human-genome-sequencing costs will drop to "a few hundred dollars."